Horace Günzburg

Horace Günzburg — Naftali Herz, in the synagogue — was born in 1833 at Zvenigorodka, in the Kiev governorate of the Russian Empire, the son of Joseph Yozel Günzburg, a liquor-tax farmer who became the greatest Jewish banker of Russia and founded the house of J. E. Günzburg in St Petersburg in 1859; the family were observant Jews who kept a synagogue in their house, and Horace, who inherited the bank and its leadership, remained all his life the acknowledged head of the Jews of the Empire.

Hesse-Darmstadt made his father and then him hereditary barons, in 1871, a title the tsar allowed him to bear, and he served as consul-general of Hesse in the Russian capital; the bank financed railways, sugar and the gold fields of Siberia, and he sat on the councils of the St Petersburg exchange and of the city, until in 1892 a law barred Jews from municipal office and he resigned in protest. His real work was his people's: in 1863 he founded, with his father, the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia, which for half a century opened schools, gave scholarships and published the first Jewish scholarship in Russian, and he presided over it for forty-five years; he helped found ORT in 1880, financed the Jewish agricultural colonies and the emigration societies, and after the pogroms of 1881 and the May Laws of 1882 went again and again to the ministers and to the tsar to plead against the persecutions, with little success and without ceasing.

He was the patron of the sculptor Antokolsky, of the composer Rubinstein and of a generation of Jewish scholars, and he died in St Petersburg on 2 March 1909; his son David, an orientalist, carried on the house and its library.